Community Fund stands by asylum group grant

The head of the body which distributes national lottery cash to charities and community groups has defended a grant made to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC).

Speaking to the Commons' public accounts committee, the Community Fund's chief executive, Richard Buxton, did, though, admit that the fund's assessment process had not been "robust enough" to pick up the small amount of NCADC's work that should not have been funded.

The £340,000 grant made to the anti-deportation group last year sparked a furious onslaught on the fund by the Daily Mail. The home secretary, David Blunkett, and the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, also drew critical attention to its grant-making processes.

The NCADC grant was subsequently upheld, but conditions were imposed to prevent the group pursuing "doctrinaire" activity.

The organisation, which is also supported by other grant-making trusts, has helped 112 people win the right to remain in Britain through public campaigns, but lost 19 cases where individuals were deported. Another 100 or so have been helped through low-profile "parish pump" campaigns involving petitions and letters to MPs.

Mr Buxton told the public accounts committee: "95% of the work of the organisation is not something the wider public would recognise as political."

It provided advice and support to individuals that would be considered "very worthwhile" and helped people exercise their legal rights to petition the home secretary for the right to remain in Britain, he said.

But he added: "A limited proportion of the work they were doing went outside the boundaries of what the Community Fund ought to be funding."

Mr Buxton admitted that the fund's "process was not robust enough" to pick this up.
Pressed by the committee chairman, Edward Leigh MP, over whether the political work of the campaign "should not be funded by the lottery", Mr Buxton agreed.

Mr Buxton said: "We did not do a website check" - a move that would have picked up comments that "associated the word fascist" with the home secretary. He said the fund's procedures did not require grant officers to check applicants' websites at the time.

This was "a management failing, not the failing of individual members of staff", Mr Buxton told the MPs. The fund now checks the NCADC's website once a week as part of its monitoring of the new conditions attached to its grant.

He pointed out that the 2002 grant followed an earlier payment to the NCADC in 1999. The fund had received no complaints from the public or anyone else about the group between the first award and the second, he said.

Gerry Steinberg MP quizzed Mr Buxton about material he had seen on the NCADC website that day, referring to a passage that said: "The bad news is David Blunkett intends to starve out of Britain any families who claimed asylum after October 3, 2000 who have been refused asylum and whom the government cannot/will not remove by force."

Mr Steinberg asked: "Is that acceptable?" to which Mr Buxton replied: "I think that's emotive language I wouldn't support." But asked if there should be "some kind of recovery" of the grant, Mr Buxton said terminating funding was "something I'd do reluctantly [in the case] of any grant".

Speaking after the committee hearing, Mr Buxton said that the material quoted "could have crossed the line" into doctrinaire activity. If it had, he would ask the NCADC to "modify their remarks".

"We would only consider removing funding if they refused to withdraw them," he said.

NCADC management committee member Liza Schuster told SocietyGuardian this morning that the campaign had not heard from the fund since the public accounts committee hearing, but expected to receive a letter and would discuss the matter with the fund.

The comment appears on the NCADC site, linked to the reproduced text of a Home Office statement.

Ms Schuster said: "It is clear from the Home Office's own words [that the home secretary] is using the withdrawal of support as leverage to persuade people to leave, in which case putting it as bluntly as we have done is accurate. The words are emotive, but it's an emotive issue.

"If we've got something wrong, we would withdraw it. But what is usually the case is that we would expand and explain it. We are not doctrinaire. We have a minority position but it is carefully thought out and backed with evidence. We are always happy to discuss whatever is on the website."